Bee season 2021 is our second attempt at keeping bees. The first year was a disaster with losing our queen. So this year we decided to do two hives so we have a back up. We also decided to go pick up our bees instead of mailing them because we had all kinds of shipment issues last year.
So on Saturday morning we left the house at 7 am and drove to Orland for a drive thru bee pick up event. Normally the company has a big festival but with covid they did it safe and just had everyone drive through. It was about a 6 hour round trip event.
We got two bee buses each with their own queen. We waited until it was cool and started to install them.
It was a huge disappointment to find out the the first queen was DEAD. We had to quickly regroup and close up the bee bus and abort the installation. The plan is to have a new queen overnighted to us on Monday and try again.
The bee bus above is the one with the dead queen. This is us trying to decide what to do.
We moved onto the second bus and began installing in the yellow hive. We are happy to report that Queen Freddie Mercury is alive and well and it looked like a bunch of healthy worker bees.
We dumped all the bees in, hung Freddie in her cage and now we wait to see if they release her and accept her.
This is the cage that shows the dead queen. When you add the queen to the hive, you pull off the pink cap and then the other bees will eat thru the candy that is placed in the opening. Once the candy is eaten, the queen is freed. And in the time it takes to eat the candy, they come to accept the queen.
And here she is - dead. The white dot shows that she is a queen from 2021. They use a different color each year.
Stay tuned to see what happens with her replacement.
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